firecrawlvsphpscraper

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Apr 01 2024 0.0.0(2025-03-15 00:00:00 ago)

583 2 28 GPL-3.0-or-later

May 04 2020 104 (month) 3.0.0(2024-04-09 15:34:59 ago)

Firecrawl is an AI-powered web scraping API that converts web pages into clean Markdown or structured data, optimized for use with large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. It handles JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass, and content extraction automatically.

Firecrawl offers multiple modes:

Scrape Convert a single URL into clean Markdown, HTML, or structured data. Handles JavaScript rendering and anti-bot protections automatically.
Crawl Crawl an entire website starting from a URL, with configurable depth, URL patterns, and page limits. Returns all pages as clean Markdown.
Map Quickly discover all URLs on a website without fully scraping each page. Useful for sitemap generation and crawl planning.
Extract Use LLMs to extract specific structured data from pages based on a schema definition.

Key features:

Clean Markdown output ideal for LLM context windows
Automatic JavaScript rendering with headless browsers
Built-in anti-bot bypass for protected websites
Structured extraction with JSON schemas
Batch crawling with webhook notifications
Python and JavaScript SDKs

Firecrawl is a commercial API service (requires API key, has a free tier) backed by Y Combinator. It has become one of the most popular tools for feeding web content into AI applications and is widely used in the LLM/RAG ecosystem.

Note: while the primary service is an API, the core is open source and can be self-hosted.

PHPScraper is a universal web-util for PHP. The main goal is to get stuff done instead of getting distracted with selectors, preparing & converting data structures, etc. Instead, you can just go to a website and get the relevant information for your project.

PHPScraper is a minimalistic scraper framework that is built on top of other popular scraping tools.

Features:

Direct access to page basic features like: Meta data, Links, Images, Headings, Content, Keywords etc.
File downloading.
RSS, Sitemap and other feed processing.
CSV, XML and JSON file processing.

Highlights

ai-poweredpopularasync

Example Use

```python from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY") # Scrape a single page - get clean markdown result = app.scrape_url("https://example.com/blog/article") print(result["markdown"]) # clean markdown content # Extract structured data with a schema result = app.scrape_url( "https://example.com/product/123", params={ "formats": ["extract"], "extract": { "schema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "name": {"type": "string"}, "price": {"type": "number"}, "description": {"type": "string"}, }, } }, }, ) print(result["extract"]) # {"name": "...", "price": 29.99, ...} # Crawl an entire website crawl_result = app.crawl_url( "https://example.com", params={"limit": 100, "scrapeOptions": {"formats": ["markdown"]}}, ) for page in crawl_result["data"]: print(page["metadata"]["title"], page["markdown"][:100]) # Map all URLs on a site map_result = app.map_url("https://example.com") print(f"Found {len(map_result['links'])} URLs") ```

```javascript // create scraper object $web = new \Spekulatius\PHPScraper\PHPScraper; // go to URL $web->go('https://test-pages.phpscraper.de/content/selectors.html'); // elements can be found using XPath: echo $web->filter("//*[@id='by-id']")->text(); // "Content by ID" // or pre-defined variables covering basic page data: $web->links; // for all links $web->headings; $web->images; $web->contentKeywords; $web->orderedLists; $web->unorderedLists; $web->paragraphs; $web->outline; // basic page outline $web->cleanOutlineWithParagraphs; // basic page outline ```

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